I recently read an article that the Royal Caribbean have just given the go ahead for the largest ever cruise liner to set sail, it’s nearly 1200ft long and has something ridiculous like 5 water slides and a zoo on it (maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you get the point).
It got me thinking – is there a ceiling to how large a boat can be? Does buoyancy have a limit? If you ignored the impracticality of mooring and getting into smaller bodies of water, is the capacity of Ship building limitless?
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As many others pointed out “Sea Worthy” and “will it float” are not the same thing. Also at some point you start to strain the idea of calling it a ship.
The ocean is not flat, it moves around a lot. At some point you run into mechanical limits of a rigid structure, if you had a “ship” that was 10 miles long and the front end encountered a storm that blew it violently in one direction while the back end was still like an hour away, if your vessel as rigid or even semi-rigid, it would tear in half.
But if you don’t limit yourself to what we normally think of as a “ship” you could, at least in theory, do all kinds of crazy large scale things. For example you could create a series of large floating “nodes” connected by flexible pathways and spooling/retracting cables that allow it to bend and move and change shape with the ocean conditions. If it could very very slowly move around the oceans using some combination of sails and motors, a kind of large floating migratory city, that could become enormous. But is that really a “ship” at that point? And of course even if you could do it, is it feasible?
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